One of the initiatives that I have been shaping with colleagues at my new institution in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, specifically Damien Cahill and Martijn Konings, is the launch of an international workshop in 2014 focusing on both Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek. This is hopefully the first of a series of new initiatives in political economy at the University of Sydney with additional events including further forthcoming workshops, a major 2015 anniversary conference marking 40 years of the emergence of political economy at the University of Sydney, and new appointments. Those developments are all to come. For now, though, why hold a workshop on the work of both Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek in 2014?

An updated paperback edition of my book Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development has now been published. A central proposition of the book is that the conditioning situation of uneven and combined development on a world scale — as the geographical expression of the contradictions of capitalism — shapes the spatial, territorial, and scalar configuration of state power. However, although shaped by the condition of uneven and combined development, it is also the balance of class forces within state spaces that alters the developmental trajectory and spatial form of statehood through emergent passive revolutionary class strategies defining the rise of a state in capitalist society.